Who Was Painter Georges Seurat?

Who Was Painter Georges Seurat? Jake Gyllenhaal stars in the imaginary tale of 19th-century pointillist painter Georges Seurat in Broadway’s revival of ‘Sunday in the Park With George.’ We explore the real life of the famously private artist.

Neo-Impressionist Georges Seurat is having a revival in New York. Not only does he have a thematic exhibition — based on his famous painting Circus Sideshow — currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but his life is also being fictionalized in the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheimand James Lapine’s Sunday in the Park With George, starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Seurat.

His interest in drawing was evident at an early age, and he was able to study with notable teachers like French sculptor Justin Lequien as well as Henri Lehmann from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

Seurat produced his most famous work at the age of 25.

Painted in 1884, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte is one of the most famous examples of Seurat’s pointillism. Experimenting with color, form, and light, Seurat exhibited La Grande Jatte in 1886 and from then on, was deemed the forerunner of a new branch of Impressionism called Neo-Impressionism.